A Christmas Marriage Round Up!

Yesterday we finally got around to putting up our Christmas decorations!

And this morning we woke up to snow! It seems fitting. So I’m sitting with my tea and my hot water bottle and I’m feeling nice and cozy. And I’ve got the lights on on my Christmas tree, too. 🙂

So I thought maybe it was time to talk about Christmas!

I haven’t been able to think much about the season yet because I’ve been on the road so much lately. But I’ve got plans on some gifts I’m going to make this month (I’m really big on handmade gifts!) and some of the few things I’m going to buy, and plotting how we can have fun this season when my kids are home (we’re having a board game day!).

I used to write a column in the local papers for about 12 years. I loved doing it every week, but I always found December challenging. Because every December you had to write four Christmas columns. After the first few years I had very little new to say.

And I’m on the same page with this blog, too. I’ve already written a lot of gift guides, and I thought that rather than redo them, I’d update them with information from 2016 and share them again.

These are great posts! You’ll want to bookmark them and come back to them time and time again. Here are some good ones:

Christmas Gift Guides for Your Husband

One of my favourite posts! And it’s got some awesome ideas. Here’s what I did: I wrote the original post back in 2012. But in it I linked to Amazon for many of the items. Then here’s where my trick came in. I went on my Amazon reports to see what OTHER things people were buying for their husbands (I can’t see individuals’ purchases, but I can see things in general). And let me tell you–people had some super good ideas! So I took the best ideas I could find and updated the post. And I’ve done that every year. So it’s got great things that you all showed to me (and some that I thought of!) Stuff you’ve probably never seen before.

Ways to Make Christmas Meaningful

My pastor said yesterday in the service, “many of us spend far more time preparing our homes for Christmas than we do preparing our hearts.” And I thought that was so true! Now, I think part of the purposes for decorations is to help us prepare our hearts, and certainly some of the specific decorations on my tree remind me of certain things. But we need to remember that everything should be leading up to celebrating the enormous miracle that is “Emanuel–God with us.”

Sometimes we think Christmas is all about kids, and until we have kids we’re somehow “less than” or missing out. But here are some great ideas of traditions you can start when you’re just starting out–or even if you’ve been married for a while but you’re not parents.

Here’s an important one: if you don’t want to be disappointed at Christmas, share your expectations NOW. I’ve got some thoughts on how to do that and what to talk about, but it’s important to be clear beforehand so that you don’t spend Christmas in a fog of disappointment.

Can You Help Me Spread The Word About These?

Honestly, I would SO appreciate it if you could share any of these posts. They do really well for me this time of year, and one of the ways that you can wish ME a Merry Christmas is just by sharing these posts on Facebook and Pinterest! Especially the stocking stuffers ones. It helps me with my traffic and with all kinds of other things, and I’d really love it.

What’s Coming This Week….

I’m excited about something. I’ve almost got it set up, but I’m creating some fun nighties that you can buy with some special sayings from my “Girl Talk” event, and I want to use them to fundraise this Christmas. I’ve got my eyes set on two charities to help girls around the world, and I’m going to challenge us to see if we can raise a certain amount of money just from the readers of this blog. I really want to give back. So I’ve got my ministry director Tammy and my daughter Rebecca working frantically behind the scenes to get it all ready, and I hope to show them to you this week and get the challenge going! Christmas is a great time to bless others (and if we can help our marriages in the process, why not?)

Plus I’m going to talk about how to have a SEXY December with your hubby. I totally believe that Christmas should be about preparing our hearts for celebration–but I also believe a fun marriage can be part of that! And I think Christmas and marriage go together because often we have more time together than usual. So let’s look at how to turn up the heat when it’s cold outside (at least it is in my neck of the woods!)

Plus this month we’ll be talking about in-law issues and how to make Christmas great for kids. So if anyone has any particular extended family issues, leave a comment and I’ll try to address it.

I’m starting to feel in the Christmas spirit.

Emanuel. God with us. He left heaven to live among us to show us how to live, and then to die so that we could live forever with Him. It’s a precious time. And it points to the fact that He is coming again! Just as we wait now to celebrate Jesus’ birth, so we live in this in between time when we wait for Him to come again. Waiting trains us. It’s part of faith. And excitement should be part of waiting! So let’s learn to marvel, as we expectantly wait, for God to do something precious.

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6 Comments

Nicole
on December 5, 2016 at 11:10 am

My MIL doesn’t know when to leave our home. She admits it. Her home is not a happy place, but she chooses to continue to live there. She is a complainer and negativity is her default. Our two daughters are six and under and we raise them to be positive minded. My question is, she asked us what we were doing this year for Christmas and that she’d like to go to our church even tbough she has her own and lives in another town. My first thought was NO! She will just ask to come back to our house after and won’t leave until midnight. Even though I turn lights out, dress in my pj’s and go to bed..she still doesn’t get the hint. She talks about others, gossips about her own children and is nice and candy sweet to my face, but gossips about me behind my back. My hubby just tunes her out, so guess who is stuck with being the bad guy. How do I pass that baton back to my hubby?

Upfront expectations. Tell her she is welcome to come to church with you, but you will be spending the day with the kids and their new toys after, so she is welcome to come another day to play with them. Better if it comes from your husband, but it is your house and family as well. Or, if you’d like to have her over for a bit after church be sure to let her know when you are expecting the visit to end. Christmas is an exhausting day with small children, but also a great time to create family memories, so I never felt guilty about taking that time with mine!

Love this round up! I have an extended family issue I’d like your thoughts about, but it’s a hard one: how to love your family who are living sin, especially when you only see them once or twice a year. In the last 12 months, one extended family member has embraced an aggressively transgender lifestyle and another has embraced homosexuality – but they are also turning away from Christ in the process, which I see as the core problem. If they don’t belong to Christ, then of course they’re going to look for their identity in other places like in their sexuality. But how can I love them during the holidays, finding that balance between preaching (since I disagree) and ignoring the issue to preserve some kind of relationship. Hard things!

Ooooh, I’ve got a week on extended family issues coming up next week! So I’ll definitely tackle that. I think extended family issues always kick in around Christmas. So I’ll get that up next week! I think the key thing is just to love people. They already know what you think. But you may need to limit time, too, to protect kids at times.

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About Sheila

Sheila Wray Gregoire has been married for 25 years and happily married for 20! She loves traveling around North America with her hubby in their RV, giving her signature "Girl Talk" about sex and marriage. And she's written 8 books. About sex and marriage. See a theme here? Plus she knits. Even in line at the grocery store.